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Here are a couple of lessons given to Rice University player Tommy Economou. Tommy originally sent in his swing in February of last year, and he experienced some nice improvement and some good college tournament results. It’s now a year later and Tommy is set to head back to school for his spring semester. As you will see, especially if you take the time to go back and look at Tommy’s first couple of lessons, old habits die hard, and when you think they are gone they tend to come back, perhaps in a different form and different degrees, but the same patterns stubbornly hang in there. Tommy’s big deal is his tendency to be very narrow in his backswing and not use his upper trunk to wind up the backswing. This is a good example of the problem with using the term “shoulder turn” when what we really should be thinking about is rotating the spine and everything that is built around it (all the muscles of the back, front and sides, the “core” to use an overused word). When Tommy starts his swing with his hands his trunk doesn’t wind up enough and his left arm lifts, which in Tommy’s case causes the club to lay off at the top. He does a great job of lagging the club and controlling the shaft, but without the upper trunk coiling the initial movement of the lower body does not engage the lower part of the back, and Tommy’s arms end up running off just after impact, as you can see by the amount of left arm bend he has at impact. When he does start the swing better the whole motion changes for the better. As for his obvious tendency to straighten both knees at impact, especially with the driver, my guess is that he’s done that forever and as a skinny, smaller kid he used it to his advantage to create power. I left that alone here as he is going to be playing and that is a project for another day when I can see him face to face.
Part 3:
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